For his lecture for the Center for Experimental Lectures (at Interstate Projects, 2017) Devin Kenny illustrated how the physical infrastructure of the network, supposedly developed in the 20th century, actually developed much earlier. Drawing from a variety of sources and traditions, Kenny’s alternative genealogy understands routes of the African diaspora and practices developed during and after the Middle Passage as the origin of network technologies. BailBloc, a computer application he also helped conceive, takes the seemingly apolitical and highly dubious culture of cryptocurrency and bends its networking potential towards an abolitionist politics. Developed by The New Inquiry’s “Dark Inquiry” lab, ...

Sitting somewhere between Minority Report and the OurRevolution PAC, White Collar Crime Risk Zones is a website and app that use machine learning to predict where financial crimes will happen across the U.S.” The app’s system was trained on financial malfeasance reports going back to 1964, and by referencing events with geotagged cartography it can predict financial crimes at the city-block-level with an accuracy of 90.12%. Typically, the logic of predictive policing is applied to ‘street’ level crime (drugs, assault, etc), and has rarely (if ever) been applied to the financial crimes of white collar criminals. Turning the technology on the ...